


Opening Day

by TigerDragon



Series: Aegis and the Avengers [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Americana, Baseball, Culture Shock, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied Sexual Content, Man Out of Time, Nostalgia, Nudity, Polyamory, always-a-girl!Toni, conspicuous consumption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:19:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After almost two years, Steve Rogers thinks he's finally got a handle on this whole "future" thing. Sure, the food and the fashion and the manners are different. Sure, he still hasn't quite figured out these smartphone things. On the other hand, his girlfriends - if that's even the right word - have enough tech savvy between them for any three people.  No, Steve Rogers definitely has the future well in hand, and today he wants to celebrate with a trip to a ballgame at his old home stadium in Brooklyn.</p><p>The future can be a sneaky thing, sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Opening Day

**Author's Note:**

> Dragon loves baseball, and nothing was going to separate her from the opening games on her radio app, so our writing for the day took on a sort of inevitable theme. Sit back and enjoy Captain America's favorite pastime, folks.

“You know,” Steve Rogers said absently while studying the first spills of dawn over the ceiling of Antonia Stark’s penthouse suite in Stark (now Avengers) Tower, “it’s the first day of April and,” he glanced out at the magnificent view of a peaceful Manhattan, “there isn’t any reason to suit up.” He rapped his knuckles on the probably-endangered hardwood of Toni’s headboard, just in case. “You want to take in a ball game?”

Antonia Stark, her hair still mussed from where his hands had been wrapped in the short silk of it, looked up at him with half-lidded eyes and made the deeply noncommittal sound of a woman more interested in afterglow than sporting news.

“As long as she has her phone,” Pepper murmured, snuggling closer to Steve from the other side. “Because otherwise she’ll have only you and me for entertainment, and getting banned for indecent conduct is not my idea of a good time.”

“That only happened once... twice... okay, three times.” Antonia stretched and leaned across Steve’s hips to kiss the redhead slowly and lingeringly on the lips. “But the third time was with Morena Baccarin and that running back from the Patriots - the short one built like an Escalade - so you can’t blame me for that.”

Humming softly, Pepper smiled into the kiss. “I can and do blame you, horndog.” Glancing up at Steve’s mingled look of interest and apprehension, she laughed. “Don’t worry, Steve, I’ll bring the field drafting kit and she’ll be good. Mostly.”

“I’m always good,” Toni sniffed indignantly, then let her hand start wandering lazily up the line of Steve’s leg. “This is an indisputable scientific fact. I’ve done rigorous studies. There was a control group.”

Pepper snorted. “Even you haven’t screwed enough people to get a statistically significant sample. You’d need to stop inventing and do it full-time.”

“Huh.” Toni rested her tongue lightly against her upper lip and affected a deeply thoughtful look, then nodded sagely. “I suppose I could have Bruce take that over for me. The inventing, I mean. In the interests of science. I’d need an assistant, of course. For data analysis.”

Steve coughed and gently but firmly extracted himself from the women. “Okay, you two enjoy your hopefully-theoretical speculation. I’m going to shower and ask JARVIS about the Dodgers schedule.”

There was an abrupt, awkward silence.

Unexpectedly unable to make eye contact with either woman, Steve frowned. _Great. Is this another future women thing? Was I not supposed to get up until they were done flirting?_ “Was it something I said?”

Toni cleared her throat, eyeing the door and reaching for the sheet at the same time. “I ought to check on my high-tensile resins. They have to be done cooking by now, right?” Pepper, for her part, was suddenly very interested in the schedule on her phone - sufficiently so, in fact, that she didn’t try to keep Toni from taking the sheet.

The spill of Pepper’s hair and the delicate curve at the small of her back distracted Steve for another minute or two. Not enough that he didn’t snag an arm around Toni’s waist to keep her from making good her escape, of course - he knew guilty running when he saw it - but enough to keep him from any more deductive reasoning (or inductive, for that matter).

“So,” he ventured.

“Um.” Pepper bit her lip imploringly at the Blackberry. Nothing happened. She sighed and turned a sheepish look over her shoulder. “You’re fine, Steve. It’s, well...”

“The Dodgers are in L.A., so we’re going to need to book a flight,” Toni said, with the air of a woman taking a bullet and damn well expecting a medal for it later.

“Oh.” _They know the team schedule - weird. Did I break up a plan for a surprise present or something?_ That made a certain amount of sense, which was more than he could say for any of the other ideas that were bouncing around in his head. _I mean, it’s not like a bad guy could have blown up Ebbets Field without me hearing about it._ “I can wait a few days for a home game. It’s nothing to get cagey about.”

“Steve,” Toni told him with a certain awkward impatience, her hand pushing gently against his bare chest, “the Dodgers are in L.A. for their home game. Try to keep up.”

“Ha ha, very funny,” Steve rolled his eyes. “Next you’re going to tell me that the Red Sox have won the World Series.”

Toni took a breath, but a pointed glare from Pepper stopped her before she had even opened her mouth all the way.

The redhead put the phone aside. “It’s not a joke, Steve. I’m sorry.”

The first Avenger went still.  It wasn’t quite like waking up to learn that Brooklyn had somehow fallen into the Atlantic, but it came close.

“But...how? When? _Why_?”

It was Toni who took the question, which was strangely comforting - blunt, sarcastic and periodically exasperating as she could be, Toni was the sort of woman who settled down when there was bad news and gave you the facts without editorial, soft-soap or comforting noises. It could be brutal, but it got the pain over fast. “Since 1958, because L.A. wanted a baseball team and Brooklyn couldn’t make Walter O’Malley satisfied with their plans on fixing up the stadium, and mainly by truck and plane. I imagine some trains were involved. I can find out, if you really want to know.” She leaned up and kissed him, very softly, and her voice softened. “The Giants are in San Francisco, too, if that matters.”

Grim-faced, he shook his head. “I never thought...” After a brooding pause, he gently took Toni’s hand from his chest, and without a word left the bedroom. The shower started after a minute, a stinging hiss that said Steve had turned the water all the way up.

Toni looked after him, her hand resting lightly on the sheet wrapped around her, and then turned and fixed Pepper with a look that was calm and completely without dramatics. “Seats. Not in a box - down by the field. Get the jet ready. And call....”

A small smile quirked Pepper’s lips as she typed, still naked. “Done and done.” Rising to wrap her arms around Toni, she kissed the genius softly on the cheek. “Wheels up in an hour. Think you can restrain yourself in a group shower?”

“I can manage. I’m not totally insensitive, you know.” Toni shifted enough to kiss the curve of Pepper’s neck, then bit the skin over her pulse almost delicately. “Just mostly.”

Pepper slipped both hands under the sheet to squeeze Toni’s ass. “Bitch,” she grinned.

“Best in the world,” Toni agreed laconically, letting the sheet drop and kissing her lover and Chief Operations Officer soundly. “Now let’s go cheer soldier boy up so we don’t miss our flight.”

 

* * *

 

Superhero, leader of the Avengers, symbolic avatar of America’s will to fight, national treasure - people have called Steve Roger all of those things, at one time or another, but when he bothered to think about it he considered himself a soldier before any of that. It was the part of the gig he fought the hardest for, after all, and it gave him one of the few reliable touchstones in the chaotic future he’d inherited. America was still America, after all, and she still needed her defenders.

Soldiers are, for the most part, practical people. They understand that you eat when food’s available, sleep when you can, and are never fooled into thinking that life is fair. They also know when to call it a day and admit a fight is lost - the ones who live long enough, anyway - and that was the particular skill that allowed Steve not to seriously consider finding a way to throw Toni off the plane on the way to Los Angeles.

Not without one of her suits, anyway.

It wasn’t that she or Pepper had been anything but kind. It was just that they’d been so mercilessly, gently thorough in getting him out of the shower, packed, dressed and onto the plane before wheels-up that he’d never really had time to properly form his objection to being hauled across the country to a baseball game between two teams that ought to have still been in New York where he’d left them. It was like finding out that your girl had gone and gotten married while you were off at war, then spent fifty years happily settled down with some other guy.

Or while you were stuck in a chunk of North Atlantic ice. Actually, it was worse than hearing about Peggy, because you expected girls to move on if you were missing or killed in action. You expected the people in your life to eventually change and die.

You didn’t expect the heart of your neighborhood to uproot itself and set up shop seven miles from Hollywood on the other side of the country. Hollywood. There would be movie stars at a Dodgers game. It was like trying to imagine Martians stopping in at Wrigley to watch the Cubs play ball. A mental image of the Chitauri fielding their own team distracted him from his grief for a good twenty minutes.

At least the Cubs were still a lost cause. Finding out that the Red Sox - the Red Sox! - were duking it out with the Yankees for the pennant every year and had won the series (twice) in the last decade was still a little like finding up and down had switched places on him.

By the time he finished imagining Times Square upside down, they were landing, and then there was an awkward forty-five minutes in the back of a limousine in heavy traffic, watching Interstate 10 wind its way through Inglewood, Culver and Central LA. Pepper gave him his privacy, but Toni insisted on putting her feet up in the red-head’s lap and leaning her head against Steve’s shoulder.

The stadium--he refused to think of it in conjunction with the name of his beloved team--was huge, and ringed with an ugly, wide swath of asphalt for convenient parking. The entrance was plastered with Times-Square-sized photographs of players he didn’t know, and the flood of fans moving through the enormous concrete gates to the turnstiles was its own kind of jarring in their ballcaps, logoed T-shirts and expensive jeans. Ebbets had filled with the people of the neighborhood, men in their beat-up suits and hats, women in their best dresses, children in whatever their parents could manage for them. He’d almost gotten used to twenty-first century fashion, but he felt justified in his grumpy regression to old-man griping about how they didn’t do things like this in his day. Fans weren’t supposed to look like _tourists_ , for heaven’s sake.

He was ready to start complaining about the big concrete arches of the walkways leading to the stands, too, but then the smell of the place caught up with him and he couldn’t speak at all. Popcorn, hot dogs, beer and peanuts and hamburgers and pizza all rolled in together with fresh-cut grass and the faint tang of glove-leather - the stadium smelled exactly the way it was supposed to, like spring and baseball, and there were tears in his eyes that he had to make a show of glowering at the concession stands to wipe away. Toni was ahead of him, trotting down the steps toward their seats with her usual impatience, but Pepper was close enough to let him know he was caught when she reached out and squeezed his arm softly.

“I hate it when she’s right,” he said in a low voice.

“It’s so aggravating, isn’t it?” Pepper agreed in her best long-suffering tone. “The best you can do is admit defeat and then distract her with something shiny.”

“I heard that!” Toni called back at them, pivoting on a concrete step and grinning, then waving over her shoulder at the pale brown and emerald green of the diamond. “I’m always right, and therefore I get to sit in the middle this time. You two can be _my_ arm candy!”

Chuckling despite himself, Steve sidled into the row of seats ahead of Toni. They were great seats--right over the dugout on the first base line--and he was caught up enough in staring across the field at the young man warming up in the bullpen that he sat down without looking around.

“Peanuts? They’re fresh.” The guy next to him offered him the open top of a brown paper bag, smiling from under a beat-up old Yankees ballcap, and Steve almost declined the offer before he got a closer look.  “Bruce!” he grinned. “She dragged you out here, too?”

“From Puebla,” Bruce agreed, grinning lopsidedly in return and giving the bag a shake. “I grabbed these from the market I was standing in when Pepper summoned me a few hours ago. They’re pretty good, but salty as hell.”

From the other side of Toni, Steve caught a glimpse of Pepper flagging down a wandering beverage salesman. “I think getting stuff people want is her superpower,” he quipped. Bruce chuckled and nodded agreement, but it was Toni who got the riposte in smoothly. “She has an app on her phone especially for that,” the genius said as she propped her feet up on the railing in front of her and leaned back, sliding her sunglasses down over her eyes. “I also suspect, but can’t prove, that she’s had us all chipped.”

“That wouldn’t tell her anything besides where we are, right?” Steved asked Bruce, a mostly-joking edge of worry to his voice.  “Right?”

As drinks were passed down, Bruce started to visibly consider the question, caught Steve looking at him and did an endearingly ineffective job of trying to look reassuring. “Of course.”

Toni put the white lie out of its misery with a snort of amused dismissal.

“You’re so worried, get a CAT scan.” Pepper was masassing organic sunblock with a ridiculously high SPF onto her freckled arms and face. “Besides, you know I’d never use my powers for evil.”

“Everyone says that until they get their supervillain origin,” Toni intoned somberly. “Just wait until that shop on Eighth stops selling that cocoa-butter and rose cream you like. You’ll be plotting world domination within the week.”

“What makes you think I haven’t conquered the world already?” Pepper inquired sweetly, spinning the cap off her water and taking a long swallow before passing it to Bruce.

“She has a point,” Bruce agreed as he took a sip and watched the last of the groundskeepers leaving the field.

The stands were filling up, most people wearing blue. At least L.A. had the grace to appreciate what they’d stolen. “Nah,” Steve disagreed. “If Pepper were in charge, tax season would be a national holiday.”

Pepper opened her mouth, blushed and mumbled into her new water bottle. “I like doing taxes. It’s relaxing.” When Toni leaned over and whispered something in her ear, the blush deepened, and Pepper cleared her throat sharply. “Um. Yes. Well. Not as relaxing as that, no.”  Some rustling of clothing seemed to start, and then Pepper sat up straight, removing Toni’s hand from wherever it had been, and shook her head firmly. “No. Baseball now. We can do _that_ later. In private.”

Bruce actually blushed. It made Steve smile sympathetically. “Every time I go away,” the scientist told him under his breath, “I forget how shameless they are. How do you live with it without going permanently nuts?”

Organ music--probably not a real organ, but it sounded close enough--blared through the speakers, and everyone started to get to their feet. The National Anthem spared Steve from having to admit to Bruce that he wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t, but he didn’t have to think about that too long before the music and the mingled singing of the crowd and the spill of the players onto the field swept everything else away except the achingly familiar excitement that didn’t seem to care that they were in LA and not Brooklyn, the twenty-first century and not the forties, padded front-row seats instead of hard wood benches. Number twenty-two - Clayton Kershaw, the big golden letters on the screen overlooking the field informed him - took the mound with easy athleticism and threw a final warm-up pitch to the catcher with an authoritative smack. In the on-deck circle, the lead-off Giants hitter took his practice swings. The crowd settled back into their seats, laughing and talking and calling for concessions, and Steve couldn’t stop smiling.

“Told you,” Toni told him, leaning across his body to steal a handful of Bruce’s peanuts and grinning insufferably.

Just this once, he was willing to smile back at her and let it go.

 


End file.
